The latest installment on my thoroughly proof-read "Complete Works of Dickens" is "Barnaby Rudge"; Dickens' 5th novel and a wonderful historical novel telling the story of the anti-Catholic "Gordon Riots" of 1780. It's many years since I read this, prior to proofing it, and I'd forgotten what a terrific read it is!

This is probably the most tedious proof-reading job I've yet done. The PG text was in a shocking state - obviously scanned and then indifferently corrected. I've corrected literally thousands of errors, the majority of which were missing quotations marks, restored all the missing formatting (italics, etc.), and re-scanned a number of the illustrations which were of poor quality.

It looks like a rushed job through the scanner. Will you rescan by visiting the library at Harvard?

Google Books' version doesn't suffer from the above, but has dust and ink lifting artifacts. This looks like the best scanned copy to base the conversion, although it does not have the crisp look of some pages on archive.org. Good luck. Whatever you do should be a welcome addition to what we currently have (I'm referring to the AMS reprint).

Thanks. Just so you know there is also a PDF and TeX version available at Project Gutenberg; that is if you were not already aware of this. I anticipate that my effort is going to take a while. One of my selfish reasons for the undertaking is that I've always wanted to learn MathML, especially now that the major web browsers support almost all of it. The intended path is prepare a XHTML version (including MathML), conversion of the MathML to SVG, and produce an EPUB and PDF (sized for readers) product to upload here.

So I guess what I should say is that if anyone else wants to produce something for the folks here in a quicker fashion they should. I will proceed apace even if just for my own learning experience.

Oh, and yes as part of the process I plan to proof against an original paper book version.

Would it be an idea to start a new thread on the same topic, but have the first post kept current with progress reports of books being converted. This way participants can immediately see what is current and recent, and help reduce any incidents of (unnecessary) duplication?

This way no one will need to say this ....

Quote:

A History of Mathematics by Florian Cajori

I anticipate that this will be a significant effort. So if anyone else is working on this, or plans to work on this, please speak now or forever hold your peace.

Who knows there are probably 3 people out there thinking "OH! ******* !"